[Sigia-l] Faceted approach applied to content

[donnamarie at amichi.info]

Hi Kathleen,
In essence, you are saying, for each piece of content that you tag, 
for a given facet, can there be multiple correct values.  My opinion, 
is yes this is fine.  In fact, it is a strength that will help you in 
creating contextual links based on metadata values and during user 
searches.  For instance, if you are creating a site that sells plant 
seeding - a given plant my be able to grow well in 3 different zones. 
For your zone facet, there would be three relevant zone values. Each 
one would be equally correct.

The one situation that you might need to watch for is if you need 
each piece of content to exist in one section of your site (to "live" 
there)  and you are depending on your metadata to put it there.  The 
facets that are responsible for creating this mapping must be 
delineated as facets that can only have one correct value.  One way 
around this would be to create two facets.  For instance, primary 
zone and secondary zones.  The facet labeled primary zone can have 
only one value, while the facet labeled secondary zones can have 
multiple values.

One final note,  I personally find the term facet to be confusing.  I 
prefer the terms attributes and attribute values.  These terms are 
used in both the database world and the artificial intelligence 
world, to describe a very similar functionality, sometimes the exact 
same functionality.

Good Luck!
Donna Fritzsche
Strategic Knowledge Architecture and Information Design
http://www.amichi.info/




>
>
>Do the values of a facet need to be mutually exclusive?  Because I'm working
>with content and concepts, more complex ("fuzzy") than a bottle of 
>wine, I will
>allow an internal tagger to select multiple values from a facet to describe an
>entity. I'm not sure if that, classically, is considered a no-no.   I don't
>think it's a problem but want to get your feedback.
>
>Kathleen Kotwica
>Director of Online Research
>CXO Media Inc.
>kkotwica at cxo.com
>http://www.cxo.com
>
>
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